The invention relates to a method and an arrangement for determining distribution information located on the surface of mailed items.
To determine distribution information, the addresses of mailed items are read in processing machines, particularly sorting machines having OCR systems. The mailed items that are not read by the OCR system are represented on video displays of a video-encoding system, and are manually encoded. A video-encoding system can be connected to a plurality of letter-sorting systems in a pool configuration. In this instance, all of the images of non-machine-read letters (i.e., OCR rejects) that have exited the different machines are to be distributed to a system of video-decoding locations, according to specific instructions, for the purpose of video decoding; both a uniform distribution of the load and a defined prioritization of certain machines may be required.
According to the prior art, the online images of the mailed items that exit all of the processing machines are managed by a central administrator, for example an image controller, and, upon the request of a video-encoding location, the images are shunted to the requesting video-encoding location. "Online images" refers to images that are located in a mechanical operating-time path of the processing machines at the relevant time. The operating-time paths are necessary for encoding the mailed items online, that is, by passing them through a machine, or manually through video encoding. As a result of the encoding, a machine-readable code is printed on the mailed items, which can be read in subsequent machines.
Depending on the nature of the allocation of encoding jobs of the video-encoding locations to the different processing machines, the image controller controls the load of each individual machine and the load distribution in the entire system pool.
A disadvantage of this solution is the fact that all encoding requests of the video-encoding location that are relevant for a single instance are sent to the image controller. With high loads, this can cause a bottleneck effect, because the central image controller must process each encoding request of a video-encoding location. FIG. 3 shows the principle of the central image administration with the image controller.